The 1,100m deep Boulby mine host to the Rutherford Appleton Underground Laboratory
Britain’s community of astro-particle physicists is in danger of being lost forever. Dr Henrique Araujo, lecturer in astro-particle physics at Imperial College London is realistic about the chances of his field remaining a part of UK science:
“I give one lecture where I sell the experiment [ZEPLIN III], particle physicists sell the Large Hadron Collider and the students choose which experiment they are going to join.”
He continued:
“I cannot hand on heart go to them and say ‘look you should join me to work on ZEPLIN III’ because I don’t know if ZEPLIN III will be working in six month’s time.”
Studying fundamental particles of an astronomical origin, the remnants of the Big Bang, astro-particle physicists are seeking an answer to a baffling question: what is the Universe made of?
For years cosmologists and physicists were unable to balance their equations. They had calculated the total mass of galaxies but their numbers didn’t match up with what their theories had predicted. In the early 1930s a Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky came up with an extraordinary suggestion: missing matter.
A noted freethinker, Zwicky catalogued galaxies and hypothesised the existence of neutron stars. He also suggested the existence of nuclear goblins, exotic blobs of matter found in the heart of particularly massive stars, an idea that did not catch on. The concept that much of the matter that makes up the universe could be un-observable was especially far-out for pre-War years and it took a further three decades for astrophysicists to take it seriously. It was another 20 to 30 years before the rest of the physics community accepted that finding this elusive matter was a valuable and important objective.
Dr Araujo believes it was not until cosmologists came on board, that the mainstream began to take notice. Dark matter research suddenly moved from the realm of quizzical astronomers, training their telescopes at the sky, to particle physicists and cosmologists generating experimental data. This took dark matter from a blackboard theory to an international hunt.
Zeplin III could be on the brink of disappearing altogether. What does this bode for science in the UK?
ZEPLINs and WIMPs
The ZEPLIN III programme consists of a series of particle detectors designed to detect and describe the theoretical fundamental particle of dark matter, also known as the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle or WIMP.
For more than ten years Imperial College has been running the ZEPLIN programme at the bottom of a rock salt and potash mine in Yorkshire, called Boulby. At a depth of 1,100m the highly sensitive detector is shielded from background radiation.
For the last three decades, says Dr Araujo, Britain has been a pioneer in dark matter research. The repeated salami slicing of funding from dark matter research programmes over the last few has left the field in a perilous state. Imperial were, until the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory took over, the only institute to run both the facility and the experiment at an underground lab.
Canada, the US and Italy all have national underground laboratories, all run with state funding, leaving the researchers to concentrate on their experiments - - the responsibility and expense of running the facility completely removed.
Dr Araujo feared time may well be called on ZEPLIN III; cuts and the costs, in both time and money, forcing a premature end to the programme.
Fortunately the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory took over administration of Boulby. This mercy, Dr Araujo explains, almost came too late: “We had not been able to offload the facility for the ZEPLIN III project until the funding pretty much ran out.”
Then in autumn last year, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) extended funding for the Boulby facility for another year. A twelvemonth’s reprieve but the STFC was not so generous with the ZEPLIN III project: “They have not extended the project for another year. They have extended it until March.”
The uncertainty began a year or two ago; the consequence for their research is loss of personnel. “Our staff has faced unemployment within two or three weeks several times in the last year. There are only so many times you can put people through that. So people have been looking for jobs elsewhere and some have already left.”
This brain drain is not just detrimental to the amount of research, it will result in the complete loss of the field altogether. Dr Araujo continued: “This [ZEPLIN III] is not just an experiment; it is effectively an entire field in the UK.”
Glamour puss: CERN is the star of the particle physics firmament
This is extraordinary considering astro-particle physics’ history and heritage in this country. It was a struggle to get people to understand the field. Now that people do, they often look past Dr Araujo and his colleagues to the more glamorous set over at CERN.
Money, however, is tight. Last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review may have protected science funding in cash terms but in real terms it was a cut. The seven UK Research Councils have to find savings, especially as the Medical Research Council is mooted to be ring fenced in the eyes of the purse-string holders. The STFC has a large budget but a lot of that money is spent on high-tech, expensive collaborations like CERN and the European Southern Observatory. ZEPLIN III may not get a look in.
The STFC must decide if it wants to maintain the considerable breadth of its physics portfolio that it has now and find funding elsewhere or continue, as Dr Araujo would have it, to plane the extremities down little by little until all that is left is our commitment to CERN. “And really,” he said. “CERN is going to be funded whether Britain is involved or not.”
An example from the Emerald Isle
Smaller research nations have produced extraordinary results by focussing their limited funding capacity on a more narrow range of areas. Ireland for the last ten years has had Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) at the helm of its grant-giving operations. In that time, SFI has been such a success because “[SFI] concentrate on a small number of niches” according to Dr Grahame Love, Director of Communications and Policy.
The Dail, the seat of Ireland’s government, has seen furious debate over the last months as legislators plot recovery from the nation’s perilous economic state.
SFI funds around 3,000 researchers, and 350 principle investigators, in Life Sciences, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and Sustainable Energy. It is this focus that has allowed Ireland to rise from below Bangladesh in the 1980s to breaking into the top 20 nations in terms of contribution to research.
All the news coming from Ireland in recent months has been doom and gloom. But Ireland’s science research funding could be about to buck this trend and actually increase its spending power. The Irish parliament, the Dail, voted on an emergency budget on 7 December 2011. SFI, the key funding organisation in Ireland, has an extra €20m (£17m) next year to fund new research projects.
The dreaded brain drain: will the Diaspora return?
Dr Love of SFI is optimistic about the long-term result of losing academics abroad: “While people will go away, they will come back and they will return hopefully to an even more improved infrastructure and facilities.”
Dr Araujo is more concerned about the loss of expertise leaving lasting damage to Britain’s research ability: “This is the unfortunate thing, you spend a decade training a team and you end up losing them and it makes it very difficult to recover.”
Physics can suffer from an identity problem, something the high-tech industries of the declawed Celtic Tiger do not. A high-flying job with IBM or Intel in Ireland’s ICT industry is an obvious incentive to sign up to the academic courses feeding these fields and the benefit to the economy is an obvious one.
It is more difficult to draw a line between high-energy, experimental particle physics going on deep under Yorkshire and money channelling into HM Revenue and Customs’ coffers. At least, it is hard to delineate the connection when thinking in the short term. The contribution to basic human knowledge from a better understanding of the world around us is immeasurable.
Yet for all the murmurings around physics’ unpopularity, Imperial boasts a heavily oversubscribed physics department and those looking for places increase each year. This may come from the acknowledged policy of publicising the institution abroad to attract more lucrative foreign students. It may also stem from Imperial College having one of the largest and most respected physics departments in the world. There is still an eagerness amongst young school leavers to study physics there.
Undergraduates flock to the Imperial course because they are looking for answers to the big questions like, ‘what is dark matter?’ ’How was the Universe created?’ and ‘What did matter look like then?’ The hunger in the next generation of physicists is there, but the funding may not match it.
Shrinking horizons
Dr Araujo is emphatic in his belief that the UK must continue to fund a wide variety of physics programmes. Regardless of the eventual application of experimental physics, the purpose is simpler and much less pragmatic:
“It is answering these questions for the sake of answering these questions. They make you grow up as a society. If society does not think these things are important then it is probably not a society that is worth living in.”
A noble sentiment perhaps, but there remains an unavoidable barrier between physics and the lay communities.
Dr Araujo appreciates the dificulty of communication his research to the public. A problem many of his may suffer from and one that has two aspects to it. The first is the language of physics. To appreciate the complexity of findings and contribute to the discourse, an individual would need a considerable knowledge of mathematics as well as a firm grounding in the principles and processes being discussed. The language used by Dr Araujo and his colleagues in their daily research is far removed from how they communicate their findings to the public.
The second aspect of this disrupted line is an antediluvian mentality of some scientists who cast themselves as members of an intellectual elite. Dr Araujo sees in his colleagues a belief that they do not have to communicate better and they feel somehow they shouldn’t have to either. “They don’t have to because they’ve never had to thus far”, he said. ”There is also a measure of they shouldn’t have to because they think that ‘this is worth pursuing and I know better than the public.’” He continued promptly: “That is a feeling I have heard expressed by some of my colleagues.”
Poor communication is a problem that can plague all science. It lies at the heart of the public’s understanding of science and its place in society.
The UK Research Councils will announce how it will allocate the £4bn funds it has to give later in the year. Dr Araujo is concerned that may come too late to save ZEPLIN III and Britain’s astro-particle physics community, “There is a critical mass that areas must maintain in order to exist”. The salami cuts, which the particle physics at CERN can survive, astro-particle physics at Boulby cannot. It remains to be seen whether ZEPLIN III has maintained this critical mass.
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The Zeplin programme is a collaboration between Imperial, the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow, Laboratory for Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics in Coimbra, Portugal, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which is responsible for maintaining and administrating the project.
Images: Boulby mine courtesy of Dave Eagle under Creative Commons license 2.0; cartoon by Abi Millar; CERN Logo under GNU Free Documentation License and Dail under Creative Commons 3.0
Zwicky, F. (1958). Nuclear Goblins and Flare Stars Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 70 DOI: 10.1086/127284
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